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Whether drinking Red Bull, relieving chronic pain with oxycodone, or experimenting with Ecstasy, Americans participate in a culture of self-medication, using psychoactive substances to enhance or manage our moods. A “drug-free America” seems to be a fantasyland that most people don’t want to inhabit. High: Drugs, Desire, and a Nation of Users asks fundamental questions about US drug policies and social norms. Why do we endorse the use of some drugs and criminalize others? Why do we accept the necessity of a doctor-prescribed opiate but not the same thing bought off the street? This divided approach shapes public policy, the justice system, research, social services, and health care. And despite the decades-old war on drugs, drug use remains relatively unchanged. Ingrid Walker speaks to the silencing effects of both criminalization and medicalization, incorporating first-person narratives to show a wide variety of user experiences with drugs. By challenging current thinking about drugs and users, Walker calls for a next wave of drug policy reform in the United States, beginning with recognizing the full spectrum of drug use practices.
Russ Castronovo underscores the inherent contradictions between America's founding principles of freedom and the reality of slavery in a book that probes mid-nineteenth-century representations of the founding fathers. He finds that rather than being coherent and consensual, narratives of nationhood are inconsistent, ambivalent, and ironic. He examines competing expressions of national memory in a wide range of mid-nineteenth-century artifacts: slave autobiography, classic American fiction, monumental architecture, myths of the Revolution, proslavery writing, and landscape painting. Castronovo theorizes a new American cultural studies which takes into consideration what Toni Morrison calls th...
An intriguing interrogation of America’s long-running obsession with conspiracy theories Why are Americans today so fascinated by Area 51? How did rumors that the AIDS virus originated as a weapon of biowarfare emerge? Why does the Kennedy assassination provoke heated debate over fifty years after the fact, and why did Donald Trump’s birther theories only serve to increase his popularity with voters? The origins of these ideas reveal important facets of American culture and politics. Placing conspiracy thinking at the center of American history, and challenging the knee-jerk dismissal of conspiratorial thought as deluded and often dangerous, Conspiracy Nation provides a wide-ranging surv...
The new book is the definitive text on the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), providing an easily accessible account of the breadth and depth of experience gained worldwide from its use in a wide range of contexts and in different phases of education. The lessons learned from these diverse experiences are included throughout the text. Used globally in all phases of education in the different healthcare professions, the OSCE was first described by the lead author, Harden, in 1975 and it is now the gold standard for performance assessment. The new book is the definitive text on the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), providing an easily accessible account of the breadth and depth of experience gained worldwide from its use in a wide range of contexts and in different phases of education. The lessons learned from these diverse experiences are included throughout the text. Used globally in all phases of education in the different healthcare professions, the OSCE was first described by the lead author, Harden, in 1975 and it is now the gold standard for performance assessment.
The first critical analysis of how Whiteness drove the opioid crisis. In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some argued that skyrocketing overdoses were “deaths of despair” signaling deeper socioeconomic anguish in white communities. Whiteout makes the counterintuitive case that the opioid crisis was the product of white racial privilege as well as despair. Anchored by interviews, data, and riveting firsthand narratives from three leading experts—an addiction psychiatrist, a policy advocate, and a drug historian—Whiteout reveals how a century of structural racism in drug policy, and in profit-oriented medical industries led to mass white overdose deaths. The authors implicate racially segregated health care systems, the racial assumptions of addiction scientists, and relaxed regulation of pharmaceutical marketing to white consumers. Whiteout is an unflinching account of how racial capitalism is toxic for all Americans.
In The Sopranos: Born under a Bad Sign, Franco Ricci presents an insightful analysis of the groundbreaking HBO series and its complex psychological themes.
In Gumshoe America Sean McCann offers a bold new account of the hard-boiled crime story and its literary and political significance. Illuminating a previously unnoticed set of concerns at the heart of the fiction, he contends that mid-twentieth-century American crime writers used the genre to confront and wrestle with many of the paradoxes and disappointments of New Deal liberalism. For these authors, the same contradictions inherent in liberal democracy were present within the changing literary marketplace of the mid-twentieth-century United States: the competing claims of the elite versus the popular, the demands of market capitalism versus conceptions of quality, and the individual versus...
DIVArgues that the category of death was a central part of the concept of citizenship in the nineteenth-century U.S., and that the particular form of that construction functioned to naturalize white males as ideal citizens./div
Teacher Unions and Social Justice is an anthology of more than 60 articles documenting the history and the how-tos of social justice unionism. Together, they describe the growing movement to forge multiracial alliances with communities to defend and transform public education. Book Review 1: “The fight for justice – the fight for educational justice – is achieved by community wins. As more unions join forces with their communities to engage in social justice unionism the community will win, and we need a playbook. Teacher Unions and Social Justice… is that playbook. It’s packed with ideas, strategies, and the voices of change from across the nation from people who are protesting, m...
The Daughters and Spirit of Harriet is a collection of poems, short stories, songs and excerpts from donors to honor the late Harriet Tubman, Nelson Mandela and Thomas Garrett. This literary piece has been written by various writers, artists and authors nationwide to express their love for humanity and willingness to give back, which is the true spirit of Harriet Tubman. Proceeds from this book are donated tooneof the largest medical center for children, in Northern California.